


Asphyxiation

by Merixcil



Series: Whumptober 2019 [19]
Category: Taxi Driver (1976)
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26324092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Travis finds unorthodox means of entertainment on a rainy afternoon
Series: Whumptober 2019 [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1838356
Kudos: 7





	Asphyxiation

It’s as easy as falling asleep, so the poets would have you think. Step one, submerge yourself in the filth of the city, the crime and the sex and the crushing, oppressive fear that no one is really looking out for you. No one actually knows how to care. Step two, you take a step back from all that shit, and you learn that there’s really nothing worth liking about yourself in the vacuum.

The sink stinks, drain clogged with petals that have started to break down to a persistent ooze that doesn’t bear thinking about. As a result, Travis hasn’t done the dishes in more than a week. If he stands in the middle of the shitty little room he gets to pretend is an apartment and looks to the right, he sees dirty dishes. He looks to the left and he sees those same dirty dishes reflected back at him in the mirror.

He sees himself, in the mirror. He sees a deadbeat with no meat on his bones and dark circles under his eyes wondering when the hell he’s allowed to give up. He sees a dead man.

The truth of it is, they’re all dead eventually. Travis could get mugged, it happens to a lot of cab drivers, or he could pick a fight that he can’t win. He looks down at his knuckles and sees them grazed red from where he tried it with the bathroom door. He won. The door is toast, will probably be broken down to individual splinters and thrown into the sink with whatever’s left over of the flowers to burn, when he finds a minute.

Skinny. Too fucking skinny, jeans sliding off his hips. His mother would lose her damn mind if she could see him but the old broad is half way across the country and thinks that he’s making his way in the big city, living like a price. Travis would love to call her up and tell her that there is no way in this town. There’s a bite of something good, followed by a gallon of shit to wash the taste away. Stupid fucking idiot.

He fiddles with his belt, looking at the two new holes he’s bored into it over the past month and wondering if he can be bothered to go for the third. Outside the rain pisses down, washing the city away into the gutter, except not really. The cleaning it provides is surface level at best.

There’s a lip in the wall just above the front door, you could wedge something in up there if you wanted. Travis kicks his one good kitchen chair over, hoists himself up, testing the strength of the belt.

You wouldn’t think to look at it, but the belt is strong. Used to belong to Travis’s old man. Fuck it, he’s got a half decent scar on the back of his thigh from this thing, after he’d been messing around with some of the defunct vehicles up at the local chop shop. Police are like that in the Midwest, let the parents provide the punishment and leave the law to it’s own devices.

The law always has it’s own fun. Travis buckles the belt, leaving a wide hoop and sticks his head through it, tightening till the pressure on his windpipe goes from unpleasant to insufferable. He breathes in and his stomach lurches when he finds he can’t get enough air into his lungs. He hates it, then leans into it, the chair swaying under his feet, flirting with the possibility of falling away completely.

No one would know. No one would even come looking till his ma called the landlord or he started to stink to high heaven. And how the fuck is a little old lady supposed to get the number for a building she doesn’t know the address of in a city she’s never been to? Fat chance.

His fingers begin to tingle, his eyes bulging. The chair stutters and sways. No air, no breath, no life to the whole wretched thing.

Till he thinks the pressure might make him puke. Travis backs out right when his vision starts to go dark. So he’s a coward, like the rest of the men around him. Who’d have guessed?

Crawling to the bathroom, gasping for air, still not totally sure he isn’t going to lose his breakfast all over the floor, Travis staggers to his feet and surveys himself in the mirror. He ought to have smashed the thing the day he move in.

An angry red line circles his neck, a pinprick of blood where the buckle dug in too hard. He can breathe and everything is wrong again. Travis catches his eye in his reflection, trying to work out what the idiot wants. He smiles, and the other guy smiles back, and he can live with that, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'whumptober' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >Crucifixation: I approve!  
> >>Merixcil: *thumbs up react*


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